Arlo Baby monitor

Netgear Arlo Baby monitor Review

Netgear’s Arlo Baby monitor looks friendly with its green bunnies at home, hidden on a shelf in a child’s nursery. But it is not a toy – this high definition video monitor is equipped with night views, temperature and air sensors, variable color light and a loudspeaker that reads lullabies.

Design

The Arlo baby monitor is a smart home product. It has removable rubber ears and toes that you can change for a kitten or puppy. At 4. 3 x 2. 6 x 2. 5 inches, it is very compact and springs with a wall bracket if you choose this option.

It took less than 5 minutes to install the arlo baby monitor. Just connect the micro USB cable supplied to the Arlo Baby monitor and connect it to an AC adapter. You can start the Arlo baby monitor app on your iPhone or Android device when the light flashes orange, create an account and connect up to five Arlo cameras that can display all live data at once. Netgear also offers indoor and outdoor security cameras under the Arlo label in addition to the baby monitor.) Follow the instructions to place Arlo Baby monitor on my Wi-Fi network is also a breeze–the connected video monitor has not once left the network.

Arlo Baby monitor has a 2400mAh on-board battery, but keep the camera connected all night if you want surveillance. Before midnight the baby battery is out. But the battery is still useful in other rooms for monitoring snaps, so it doesn’t stop if you have to move the camera from one outlet to another.

Features

The Arlo Baby monitor camera uses a resolution of 720p and 110 degrees, but you can adjust it to 1080p and 130 degrees respectively and 360p and 90 degrees. Best of all, the app allows you to specify which areas a motion alert should trigger.

This is helpful if you want to see the camera in the bed, but ignore the cat coming in and out of the door all night. You must find the right angle by adjusting the arlo baby camera camera manually. The arlo baby camera is not motorized to enable you to switch and tilt through the app, but you can zoom in with the app.

A changing night light on the back of the “head” of Arlo Baby monitor illuminates the room more smoothly than a light in the front, and can turn off the pleasant touch of the status light. The Arlo Baby monitor application contains six sounds (MP3 quality, but not voices, only music box sounds) and three white sounds to play on the speaker. You can edit or rearrange the playlist, or add your own MP3 songs from cloud storage. You can even record your own voice directly with the Arlo baby monitor application by singing or speaking.

A unique feature is the permanent listening mode of the Arlo Baby monitor. This function continuously transmits the audio from the device’s microphones to your smartphone, even if you use other applications or your phone is locked. Basically, it replaces the need for a separate portable monitor, although Netgear says that soon an Arlo Baby monitor version will be available with a dedicated laptop monitor. However, in our tests, the mobile application on a smartphone was the perfect way to register at the nursery.

The sensors on board measure the temperature (tenth of a degree), the humidity (tenth of a percentage) and the air quality in your baby’s room, and you can receive notifications when one of them is out of your reach. The relative amount of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the room explains the “air quality” in the application. Netgear says that you can normally reduce it to “Normal” by opening a window for a while if you get an “abnormal” or “very abnormal” reading.

Related: 10 Best baby Monitors 2018

Performance:

Arlo monitor videos look good. They’re in full, bright color if there’s any light in the room, and they offer quality night vision.

I could see my son’s face clearly in the dark about 8 feet away, although his eyes had that scary glow of night vision, like that of a raccoon when he loots the garbage. In the morning, his window is dazzled by the sun (one day, I will remember to buy opaque blinds), but the rest of the image remains clear.

The well-designed Arlo baby monitor app is incredibly versatile: when Arlo Baby monitor detects a movement or hears a sound, it can take a snapshot or record a video and send you a push notification, an email or both. When watching the live stream, you can start recording, take a picture, talk on the two-way speaker, set the night light, start or stop the music, set the timer after a while and check the sensor data. Everything is at your fingertips and easy to find, especially if you take everything into account.

The Mode tab of the application allows you to schedule monitoring if you only want to receive alerts during scheduled naps and after bedtime. If you wish, you can define a geographical fence to have different monitoring rules depending on whether you (and your phone) are at home or not. But it is not precise enough to identify the baby’s room. And, of course, you can simply turn the monitoring on and off manually. You can even create your own sets of rules (for example, for days, nights, and weekends) and switch between them.

The Library tab displays all the videos and snapshots taken by the camera, which are kept free in the cloud for seven days, with additional optional storage plans. Downloading or tagging videos and snapshots as favorites is also easy.

Unfortunately, Arlo Baby monitor takes a little time to show you what happens after receiving a notification, because you have to get started and log in to the Arlo app. The app supports Touch ID and Face ID on the iPhone, so I did not have to enter the full password, but that’s another step. And then the image of the camera has to load. Depending on the speed of your network, it can take between 30 seconds and a minute. I want the app to attach a snapshot to the push notification, so I would know if I should actually open the app or not.

Arlo Baby monitor range of Netgear cameras is IFTTT compatible. So you can, in theory, have a Hue flash if the camera detects a motion or receive a notification when the battery is low. But the Arlo Baby monitor camera does not appear as supported in the IFTTT app – the Netgear forums say it’s a known bug and is under development.

Related: 10 Best baby Monitors 2018

Bottom Line

With its simple configuration, user-friendly application and its many features, Arlo Baby monitor is a solid choice for parents who need a video monitor. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to add my own lullabies to the playlist, as well as notifications when my son’s room was too hot or too cold. Getting seven days of cloud storage for videos and snapshots with no subscription fees is also a big advantage.